On artificial disinfection as a means of preventing the spread of infectious diseases / by J.H. Timins.

Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On artificial disinfection as a means of preventing the spread of infectious diseases / by J.H. Timins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    points, however, ought to come into a special inquiry into their life-history, so that we have considered it advisable at present merely to draw them in their general positions, shape, and size, as seen under the power used in making all the drawings in this research. But of far greater importance than their shape is the character of the substance composing these granular bodies, and this, we think, we have been able to ascertain satisfactorily, as far as their biological character is concerned. As may well be conceived, the first point of importance to settle was whether these were fatty or protoplasmic in their nature. If, as was hkely, they were fat-granules, little importance was to be attached to them; but if, on the contrary, they were proto- plasmic in character, they were aU-important as a key to the past and an explanation of the future. To decide this point we had to vary our methods of preparation and, instead of using the pyrogaUate of iron, we treated our mem- branes with ether, logwood, carmine, indigo, purpurine, and eosine, with and without osmic acid, and the result was unmistakable. Osmic acid did not blacken, while colouring agents stained, logwood being prominent among the rest in the intensity of its staining, showing that these granules were protoplasmic in character and not fatty. The character stamped upon them by staining tests, as well as the power they appeared to possess of moving off at pleasure from the parent-cells by their own inherent power, and as we shall afterwards see of probably moving back again when the conditions were reversed, show us that we have here to do with something specific in biology, something vastly more minute, and a stage more elementary than the composite body called a cell; something which lives and moves and has its being independently of the cell, and to which we are called upon to assign a specific sphere in nature. Have we here germs, the micrococci, the zoogloea, the spores, fungi, bacteria, or the spores from which bacteria are developed in these living atoms ? It is impossible to evade the conclusion that had these been observed in sections of tissues, where their connection with the cell or its nucleus could not be traced, more especially in any specific disease, they would indubitably have been ascribed to some of the foregoing classes, and (perhaps not without reason) the most serious conclusions might be drawn from their presence. We have no doubt that they furnish a key to the alleged discoveries of some of the above-named classes of organisms in certain specific or infective diseases in the past, and they may probably furnish an explanation of many infective processes in the future. We may also mention here, with reference to a recent biological mistake in the character of germs that, whether treated with or